KY Board of Ed Ready to Kill Public Education

Charter schools are a scam.  Period.

The private ones funnel tax dollars directly from the public purse into the pockets of corporations without spending a dime on actual, you know, education.

The supposedly "public" and "nonprofit" ones steal tax dollars for religious or corporatist indoctrination free from any oversight or accountability.

Public education is exactly that: public education.  Any diversion of a single dime in tax dollars to entities not currently paid to, you know, teach is an absolute abdication of public responsibility and grounds for impeachment of every public official who advocates it.

Valerie Honeycutt-Spears at the Heralde:

Members of the Kentucky Board of Education appear open to charter schools for Kentucky, although the panel did not take a position after a daylong study session Monday.

The board is going to review other states’ laws and is expected to come to a consensus at its December meeting in advance of the 2017 General Assembly.

No legislation had been prefiled in the General Assembly by Monday. In 2016, a bill failed in the legislature that would have allowed charter schools as a pilot in Fayette and Jefferson counties, urban districts that are grappling with an achievement gap between minority, disabled and low-income students and other students. But a charter school bill is much more likely to pass in the coming legislative session after Republicans won control of the state House in the election earlier this month.

 PZ Myers reminds us that nothing about charter schools improves education.  Because, again, their purpose is not to educate; it's to profit.

Vouchers don’t work!

The longest running voucher program in the country is the 20-year-old Milwaukee School Choice Program. Standardized testing shows that the voucher students in private schools perform below the level of Milwaukee’s public school students, and even when socioeconomic status is factored in, the voucher students still score at or below the level of the students who remain in Milwaukee’s public schools. Cleveland’s voucher program has produced similar results. Private schools in the voucher program range from excellent to very poor. In some, less than 20 percent of students reach basic proficiency levels in math and reading.

Vouchers are simply a means to an end: the demolition of the public school system. The DeVoses can afford the best private schools, and if you can’t, you deserve to be uneducated.

We thought Trump would be bad. We had no idea how awful electing an incompetent sould be, because it’s clear that the first thing he’s doing is appointing more incompetents solely on the basis of ideological fanaticism.

 And the truth about privatization has been known for decades.

Via The Nation, from a 1975 article by Chilean dissident Orlando Letelier, later assassinated by Pinochet's thugs for daring to tell the truth.

This situation recalls the story of a Latin Amer­ican dictator at the beginning of this century. When his advisers came to tell him that the country was suffer­ing from a very serious educational problem, he ordered all public schools closed. Now, more than seventy years into this century, there still remain disciples of the anec­dotal dictator who think that the way to eradicate pov­erty in Chile is to kill the poor people.